Canada to apologize for turning away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany

[DennisTate]

It sure is nice to see something positive being done by our Prime Minister who usually tends to be way off in the political left wing never never land.  

 

Canada to apologize for turning away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany

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Ottawa (AFP) - Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday that he will apologize for Canada's refusal to admit Jewish asylum seekers fleeing Nazi Germany just months before the start of World War II.

On May 13, 1939 the ocean liner MS St. Louis departed Germany with 907 German Jews aboard and crossed the Atlantic Ocean "desperate for safety and refuge from persecution," according to a statement from Trudeau's office.

The passengers however were not allowed to disembark at the ship's first destination, Cuba, and were subsequently denied entry in the United States, and Canada -- due to "discriminatory 'none is too many' immigration policy of the time," the statement read.

Forced to return to Europe, many of the passengers were sent to concentration camps, and 254 died in the Holocaust.

The date for the apology on the floor of the House of Commons has not yet been set.

"When Canada denied asylum to the 907 German Jews on board the MS St. Louis, we failed not only those passengers, but also their descendants and community," Trudeau said in a statement.

 

 

 

 

This apology is especially meaningful to me personally since I live in Nova Scotia.  An attempt was made to bring the refugees into my province but it was rejected by a rather anti-Semitic federal level administration that was in power at that time.  

Edited August 13, 2018 by DennisTate
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[DennisTate]

Aha yes... this rather nicely ties in with a concept that could be used to address some current trends and problems.

 

[Sunday21]

I met a woman, elderly, who had been a child on a shipload of Jewish children who were refused by Canada around this time. Fortunately the US took them in. Shameful! 

[DennisTate]

27 minutes ago, Sunday21 said:

I met a woman, elderly, who had been a child on a shipload of Jewish children who were refused by Canada around this time. Fortunately the US took them in. Shameful! 

I am searching for more specifics on this at this moment.... .I haven't found that exact event yet... but I am glad that I found this sobering and saddening article.  

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/brian-mulroney-canada-and-the-jews

Brian Mulroney: Canada and the Jews

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Canadians talk proudly of our tolerance and fair-mindedness. Often a tone of moral superiority insinuates itself into our national discourse. But these virtues, such as they are, are of fairly recent vintage. The truth is we have little to be smug about.

For instance, in 1933, Toronto witnessed the Christie Pits riot when local anti-Semites terrorized a Jewish baseball team in a street battle that went on all night. The next year in Montreal all the interns at Hospital Notre-Dame went on strike to protest the hiring of a Jew as their colleague. The offending Jew in question, one Samuel Rabinovitch, had graduated first in his class at l’Université de Montréal but was forced to resign after a few days because, as Le Devoir reported, Catholic patients would find it “repugnant” to be treated or touched by a Jewish doctor.

In 1938, the Canadian Jewish Congress decided not to publish a study of the status of Jews in English Canada because the findings were so profoundly unsettling. But overt anti-Semitism, and an abject failure to appreciate its ultimate consequences if unchecked, were not parochial considerations, nor were they limited to minor players in Canadian society.

On Feb. 10, 1937, Canada’s prime Minister Mackenzie King records in his diary a friendly chance encounter he had the previous Monday night with an elderly man on Wilbrod Street in Ottawa. The man, a Russian immigrant called Mr. Cohen, tells the prime minister that he built a furniture and clothing business on Rideau and Banks Streets, that he had 3 sons and a daughter, that he had divided all he possessed among them and was now living in retirement with his daughter. In other words, a true Canadian success story.

The prime minister listened to Mr. Cohen thoughtfully, treated him kindly and then recorded the following in his diary: “The only unfortunate part of the whole story is that the Jews having acquired foothold of Sandy Hill, it will not be long before this part of Ottawa will become more or less possessed by them. I should not be surprised if, some time later, Laurier House was left as about the only residence not occupied by Jews in this part of the city.”

 

 

Edited August 13, 2018 by DennisTate
grammar

[Sunday21]

@DennisTate I can only hope that these antisemites are spending at least part of their eternity cleaning floors with toothbrushes!